With the advent of modern digital photography, the simplicity of taking a high quality color photograph has never been easier. Even the most inexperienced of users are able to take excellent pictures without the need to manually adjust settings to ensure a proper picture. This is largely due in part to the ability of electronic devices to automatically adjust settings. Examples of such automatic adjustments include an automatic white balance setting and the automatic exposure setting.
White balance is the process of removing unnatural color casts, so that objects which are perceived as white by a person are rendered as white in an image captured by an imaging device such as a camera. Proper camera white balance has to take into account the “color temperature” of a light source, which refers to the relative warmth or coolness of white light. Human eyes are capable of automatically judging what is white under different light sources, but digital cameras often have great difficulty doing the same with auto white balance and can create unsightly blue, orange, or even green color casts.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a device that is capable of using a reference object in any lighting situation to properly and automatically adjust the white balance prior to taking the photograph.